ways of thinking
The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) • Mistaking fluent speech for fluent thought
If we wish to understand the nature of reality, we must begin not with theories or models but with what is actually present – the raw fact of experiencing.
The Nature of Mind
how does smell demonstrate phenomenology more starkly than sight?
what is “embodiment” in the context of inhaling scent?
definitions
phenomenology - studying conscious lived experience from a first person point of view
existentialism - philosophical movement focusing on human existence, freedom, choice, and the meaning (or lack of it) of life. It asks: What does it mean to exist as a human being?
Dasein - a German word coined by Heidegger meaning “being-there”
Contingenc
A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the
... See moreSarah Bakewell • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
The contemporary phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty characterized his thinking as a philosophy of the lived body or the body subject. Key to his analysis was the notion of embodiment, which draws a distinction from the objective body, which is regarded solely as a physiological entity, and the phenomenal body, which is not just any body, or
... See moreRichard Strozzi-Heckler • The Art of Somatic Coaching: Embodying Skillful Action, Wisdom, and Compassion
phenomenology
“It doesn’t matter what someone is. Only what they think they are.”